Allegheny Land Trust: St. John’s Citizen Science Analysis
Done in conjunction with CMU Students Using Data for Good, on the Allegheny Land Trust’s (ALT) St. John’s project, with Audrey Yang and Jenny Lyu.
The question
Has community participation in citizen science grown faster around the ALT’s St. John’s project (in Pittsburgh’s Brighton Heights neighborhood) than we would expect from general trends?
Approach
- Pulled iNaturalist observations for St. John’s through the iNat API, since aggregate iNat data isn’t available for a like-for-like comparison.
- Used eBird as the baseline: checklist counts for Pennsylvania and for Allegheny County, plus eBird activity in Brighton Heights itself.
- Compared annual growth rates from 2021 to 2025, using two different data sources so that the limits of each (eBird is less localized; iNat can’t be compared to a same-source baseline) partly offset each other.
Findings
| Series (2021–2025) | Annual growth |
|---|---|
| iNat observations, St. John’s | 35.7% |
| eBird observations, Brighton Heights | 27.8% |
| eBird checklists, Allegheny County | 12.6% |
| eBird checklists, Pennsylvania | 7.4% |
St. John’s iNat growth was about 4.8× the Pennsylvania baseline and about 2.8× the Allegheny County baseline. Brighton Heights eBird growth was about 3.7× and 2.2× those baselines. The write-up concludes that the pattern is consistent with the ALT project boosting local engagement, while noting that correlation doesn’t imply causation.